


We Trade Today For Tomorrow

by CaptainLordAuditor



Series: Pay Your Dues to Destiny [1]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Divorce, F/M, Fix-It, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-War, Unhappy marriage, adult!gaang, but also fuck canon, hopeful on an individual level at least, implications of a lot of stuff thats not said outright, the end of the war didn't fix everything
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-10
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-16 04:24:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13628526
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLordAuditor/pseuds/CaptainLordAuditor
Summary: Years after the war, Katara visits an old friend.Or, I'm sure this must've happened because it's the only way Korra canon makes sense.





	We Trade Today For Tomorrow

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [roses and poppies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13228791) by [thnderchld](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thnderchld/pseuds/thnderchld). 



> This is mostly canon compliant. 
> 
> Mostly.

  
_We take our turns on the altar._  
_We take our wages in sin._  
_We build our homes on the water,_  
_And wonder why the flood rolls in._

-Seanan Mcguire, “This Is My Town”

* * *

 

She goes back twenty five years later.

She and her children - _her_ children, hers, these babies brought forth into the world from her body, who have relied on her for everything for fifteen years - come in with the tide, with the summer rains and the stream of others just like her, like a cold current brought up from the south that soothes the burning heat.

He doesn’t know she’s coming, at first. He gets word from the temple that she’s gone, and he assumes she’ll go south, and news comes with immigrants that she is there, loud as the ocean on her country’s rocky shores. He doesn’t expect her to come.

(Nobody comes for him, any more, not since Iroh died; he goes to them, and he doesn’t really mind, most of the time, but they are all scattered like the winds, and nobody comes to him.)

She comes back, to the one place she remembers having anything like happiness that hasn’t been destroyed, with her daughter clinging to her skirts. She has anger in her hands and sadness in her eyes, and it doesn’t leave when she embraces him, holds him so tightly he isn’t sure he’ll ever breathe the same again.

“I’m sorry for turning up all unannounced,” she tells him. Hawks don’t live as far south as she was, and she knows that, but she doesn’t add that. It would’ve been difficult for her to send a letter, and he knows she wasn’t planning this very far in advance.

There’s nothing he can say, so he doesn’t; just pulls her into another hug, and she hugs him back, and he tries not to think about the tears he feels on his shoulder. “You don’t need to tell me before you visit.”

She pulls back so he can hug Kya, and they can keep pretending everything’s fine. She watches him silently, then says quietly, “Aang didn’t.” _I don’t want to be Aang._

He picks up eight year old Kya, who’s getting too big for this, but pulls the crown out of his topknot to play with anyway. “You left him.”

She nods. She looks like she hasn’t slept since the war. “I think I should’ve done it a long time ago.”

“Is Bumi with you?”

She glances behind her. “He’ll spend another two hours oohing over the engine system if I don’t detach him now.”

He holds his hand out. “Let him moon. We should get you inside.” _You look exhausted._ “The afternoon rains are going to start soon.”

She doesn’t take his hand, but hands him one of the two packs she has with her. “I can bend them off of us.” It’s a token argument, without her heart in it (does she put her heart in anything anymore?) and they both know it.

“But you won’t. You like being in the rain, and I’d rather not get soaked.”

She goes with him. “How’s your husband?”

He takes a moment to answer. “Better. He’ll be glad you’re here.” _He’s been waiting for years._

_We’ve both been waiting for years._

* * *

 

His husband greets her as enthusiastically as she greeted him at the docks. “Is Aang with you?”

“No. Only me and the kids.”

His smile grows broader. _Good. Sokka and I have been trying to tell you. The one thing we ever agreed on._

“How long are you staying?”

“I don’t know.” _Until the red spined salmon come in. Until the last seal hunt before winter. First light of spring. The whole year. Until my children are grown, until I’m an old woman._

His smile doesn’t waver. “You can stay as long or short as you like. Your decision.” His face turns grim when he remembers why she’s here. “Things aren’t going well in the South.”

She shakes her head. “Things are bad, Jet. I don’t know what I can do.”

_So you came here._ “That’s about what I’d expected, given the news we’ve been getting.” A lot of immigrants have been coming into the Fire Nation, the ones who don’t like what the North is doing in the South. Some of them are northerners who had wanted to _rebuild_ rather than _remake in their own image_ , but most of them are Southerners forced to choose between giving up who they are and giving up everything they have.

She sighs. “They played their cards well, Jet. There’s nobody to fight them. The Earth Kingdoms are still dealing with the independences, _you_ can’t interfere….”

“It would look like us trying to start a war again,” Jet agrees.

“It’s not just that,” she says. “Didn’t you hear about my dad?”

He frowns and shakes his head.

“They kicked him off the council.”

“What? Why?”

She slumps. “Take a guess.”

“I don’t know the water tribes, Katara,” he reminds her. “I have no idea.”

“His marriage, Jet.”

“What? But Bato’s Water Tribe, why would they -” it hits him. “Fuck.”

She nods sadly. “They’d never listen to you, even if you weren’t Fire Nation. I tried, but - where’d Zuko go?”

“He has a meeting with the ambassador from the North. He put it off to go meet you at the docks. Didn’t he tell you?”

Katara frowns. “He mentioned something on the walk here - I must not have been paying attention.”

Jet shrugs. “You have a lot on your plate. You said Bumi and Tenzin are with you?”

Katara makes a face. “Just Bumi and Kya. Aang...well. I’ll explain when Zuko’s here. It’s not really something I’d like to talk about more than once.”

Jet gives her a curious look but he doesn’t say anything. She likes that about him; he doesn’t push, just lets her say what she wants. It’s easier to be open with someone who doesn’t push.

He pours her tea and they spend a few minutes catching up, on the mundane things. She tells him about Kya’s waterbending, and Jet makes appropriate proud/impressed noises upon seeing it, which leave Kya delighted and Katara even moreso. It’s been a very long time since anyone besides her mother showed interest in her bending, and Katara had secretly started to wonder if Kya wanted to give it up.

Eventually Bumi comes in, finally bored by the ships, or hungry, Katara doesn’t know, and Jet goes silent. She knows why; somewhere under all the layers of emotion, under the imperialism and abandonment and loneliness, this is the reason she’s here.

“Bumi,” she interrupts the silence, “why don’t you take your sister and go say hello to Izumi?”

He looks like he’s about to object but he sees her face. “Okay, Mom. Come on, Kya, let’s go meet Izumi.”

Kya crosses her arms and pouts. “I don’t _want_ to meet Izumi.”

“Maybe Izumi can introduce you to the turtleducks,” Katara suggests, knowing her daughter. Kya’s spent every spare moment watching the turtleducks at the air temple for the past year.

Kya thinks about it. “Okay.”

After they go, Katara lets out a quiet sob and Jet swears.

“Agni’s breath.”

“I know.” She buries her head in her hands. “He’s not, of course, but - Tui and La, he looks it.”

“That’s the real reason you’re here, isn’t it? He’s why you left.”

Katara nods, her head still in her hands. “Aang didn’t believe me when I told him no. He’s not - you know that, I’m sure, that it’s - it’s not possible.”

“I’m _intimately_ aware of that fact,” he says with a smile.

The joke works, barely. Katara wipes her hair from her face, smiling weakly. “I know that, you know that - but Aang doesn’t. He said to me, one day, _you know, Bumi looks so much like Zuko at that age_ , and he gave me this look. Like he was waiting for me to take a hint.”

“You had a fight.” Jet sounds a little amazed, and Katara doesn’t blame him - she and Aang _never_ fought.

“It wasn’t really a fight,” she admits. “I don’t know what it was. He said that he didn’t care if I’d cheated on him, he just _wanted to know_.”

“It’s alright,” Jet tells her, then mutters to himself, “how the _hell_ did that happen?”

“I don’t know!” truly, she has no idea. A cruel trick of the spirits, that her son should look like the one man he can’t possibly be related to. Did they hear the quiet wishes she never dared voice, the ones she made silently when alone, that things had turned out differently? Jet and Zuko are a good match;  she wished every happiness on them when they married, and still means it. But sometimes she wish - no, she just… _wonders_ how her life would be different if she had married one of them instead of Aang.

Everyone has their happinesses and despairs, but most people have someone to split the burden. Even the spirits - old Southern stories talk about how the moon took the form of a man with snow white hair to woo the chieftain's daughter who became the sea. Their children were the children of the sea; the seals, the whales, the otters and the first of the mortal waterbenders.

“I didn’t know what to tell Aang,” she whispers. “It wasn’t my place to say anything. Zuko’s so private about it I wouldn’t have even known if he hadn’t needed my help when we were travelling.”

“I don’t blame him,” Jet replies. “His family really fucked him up, you know? Before we… when we were in Ba Sing Se. He once said I was lucky, because I never got the chance to know my father.”

Katara looks down. “It’s different in the South, or it was. Everybody knows each other, and nobody cares as long as you do your share of work. There’s not really any point in hiding it when everyone around you has known you since you were three.”

Jet laughs. “I get that. The freedom fighters were like that, a bit. For what it’s worth, I can’t say I’m surprised it didn’t work out with you two.”

Katara opens her mouth to argue, then stops. Why _did_ she think it would work? They’re _so different_ . Not their personalities, but their _values_. Aang wanted a family, yes, but he thinks freedom and mercy and peace are the highest things in the world, as if nothing else matters. As if only the air monks held wisdom, and that wisdom needed no changes to fix the problems of everyone else, too.

Maybe that worked for them. Compared to the Water Tribe, the Air Nomads had easy lives. Food grows readily in their mountains, fruit, nut, and grain alike. Bison hair spins and weaves easily, and you don’t need to slaughter the beast to get it. The Air Nomads, Katara thinks, were renowned for their spirituality because they _could_ be. It is much easier to reject materialism when not everything around you is a tool needed to help survive the arctic winter.

To say nothing of the way the air monks constructed family, a teacher and student and nobody else. Everything about them is completely alien to Katara. She thought, when marrying Aang, that eventually time would help her understand them, but eighteen years of marriage have only confused her more.

Katara glances at Jet and chews her lip. “Was it confusing? Marrying him, living here, in the Fire Nation.”

Jet tilts his head, thinking. “Not so much, no. Stressful, certainly. Isolating, at times. Frightening - I was terrified for the longest time that the nobles wouldn’t let us get married or adopt Izumi. Confusing… not really. I knew it was what I wanted.”

Katara looks down at her teacup. “I was just thinking that I was so confused by everything about the Air Nomads. And that that feeling hasn’t gone away.”

“It helped,” Jet says slowly, “It helped, I think, that in many ways we both raised ourselves. I learned very quickly to be self-reliant. A lot of the people here are like that too.”

“So… your experiences were similar enough that despite growing up in very different cultures you were able to overcome that.”

“I’m saying I don’t think the two of us _were_ so different.” _Not like you and Aang._ “Look, a lot of it comes down to personality. Aang… I try not to insult people, but he never really learned to compromise. Not for himself. And that’s not a good thing in a marriage.”

Katara looks at him - he’s so different from the cocky, impulsive boy she met during the war. The Jet sitting in front of her right now would never flood the village he was living off of on three days’ planning for revenge. “When did you get so smart?”

Jet grins. “I growed up when you wasn’t lookin’, Ma,” he jokes.

They both laugh and Katara feels, for the first time in years, a weight she had forgotten she was carrying lift from her chest.

**Author's Note:**

> There'll be more of this at some point, other scenes in this universe I want to write. 
> 
> I noticed ages and ages ago that Bumi and Old!Zuko look very similar facial feature wise in Legend of Korra. It might just be the way the animators aged men with beards (probably) but it struck a cord with me. The implication that Aang never spent time around Bumi and Kya never made sense to me - unless, of course, he and Katara were functionally divorced. 
> 
> p.s. Zuko's trans he's not actually Bumi's father


End file.
